New attack scenarios in the cloud

Browserstack had a security incident. It is quite interesting to see what happened and how the attacker gained access to the EC2 infrastructure.

The old prototype machine had our AWS API access key and secret key. Once the hacker gained access to the keys, he created an IAM user, and generated a key-pair. He was then able to run an instance inside our AWS account using these credentials, and mount one of our backup disks. This backup was of one of our component services, used for production environment, and contained a config file with our database password. He also whitelisted his IP on our database security group, which is the AWS firewall.